How your final grade is calculated
15%
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
Essay 6 10% Final term paper (incl. presentation) 25%
Special note:
Academic accommodations are available for students registered with the Office for Accessibility and Educational Opportunity. Students in need of ADA/504 accommodations should schedule an appointment with me early in the semester to discuss any accommodations for this course that have been approved by the Office for Accessibility and Educational Opportunity, as indicated in your AEO accommodation letter.
Attendance and class participation
Attendance is mandatory in this class, because the freshman writing seminar is a particularly small group, and because students will regularly review and provide feedback on their peers' writing. Missing more than two classes will affect your final grade.
Class participation entails having read the required readings by the date they are scheduled, coming to class prepared to discuss the readings, and contributing to posts on Moodle when they are scheduled. Your class participation grade also incorporates your efforts and quality as a reviewer of fellow students' writing, (hopefully the ethos of you-get-what-you-give will also encourage you to take this task seriously). I understand that not everyone feels comfortable speaking up in class on what will often be contentious or controversial issues. If you recognize yourself in that characterization, I encourage you to use my office hours or Moodle as a forum to share your perspectives and contributions.
In addition to meeting with me during office hours to discuss coursework, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of the Writing Center. Students are required to bring in at least one essay over the semester for consultation. For more information, visit http://ltrc.vassar.edu/writing-center.
Policy on student computers: Students are welcome to use laptop computers and iPads in this classroom. However, they must turn off texting, e-mail, Facebook, and other social media. Violating this policy more than once will result in the student being forbidden from bringing their personal technology into the classroom. Furthermore, students may not use smart phones (much less regular mobile phones) at any time in this classroom.
Essays
All the writing assignments in this class will draw upon the practices of serious writing: draft, feedback, revision. This means that all essays have several "due-dates," as a glance at the schedule will illustrate.
For any given essay, a printed first draft is due at the beginning of class. During that class meeting, time will be set aside for students to exchange and give feedback on each other's writing. Students will take this feedback home and use it to revise their first draft. The revised draft is due 5 or 7 days later, as indicated in the schedule, at the beginning of the class meeting. Grades on the individual essays will be determined based this revised draft.
Furthermore, all essays but the first one will be incorporated into a term paper assignment due at the beginning of exam week. This means that after receiving their individual essay grades, student will have yet another opportunity to revise the content of the last five essays as they incorporate these into one large term paper. Grades on this final term paper will reflect the quality of the entire document (new sections, sections revised from previous essays, and the organization that ties all this collected writing into a coherent single narrative), as well a class presentation made in the last week of class.
Below are topics and objectives for the six essays. Remember, the last five will also be part of the term paper.
Essay 1: Where do you fit into the 1% vs. the 99%?
Objectives: practice the observation/reflection essay style; use C. Wright Mills' critical methods of the sociological imagination; draw on empirical material to support your autobiographical analysis. Length: 3-4 pages (double-spaced).
Essay 2: What's at stake in Election 2012?
Objectives: practice the "relevance of the work" essay style; develop a working understanding of the past several decades of growing inequality and corporate dominance; identify and elaborate 2-3 key isues that may be decided in the coming election.
Essay 3: Proposal for a research case-study
Objectives: practice the research proposal style; select a corporation or economic organization with interests in the coming election, drawing from specific cases from the course or the news; describe these specific interests in terms of a preferred Presidential and/or Congressional election outcome; hypothesize how a favorable election reveals the corporation/organization's dependence upon, or vulnerability to, the U.S. political system.
Essay 4: Who bought this election?
Objectives: practice the empirical analysis style; review and analyze empirical data on electoral campaign contributions for your case study; analyze their patterns of donating directly, as well as the donation patterns of their economic sector and interest groups.
Essay 5: How do corporations "lead"?
Objectives: write about two CEOs (the present one, and another of your choice) from your case-study corporation/organization; document roles they have held on prominent business, political and civic organizations; describe characteristic examples of "leadership" they have taken on social/political issues; and discuss how they have shaped (and/or are constrained) by prevailing notions of corporate and political legitimacy.
Essay 6: The powers of financial capital
Objectives: discussion your corporation/organization's relationship to the global financial market via stock analysts' reports, business literature, etc.; draw upon scholarly debates about "strong" vs. "weak" corporations to assess your corporation/organization's stability in this period of global economic turmoil.
Term paper (incorporating Essays 2-6)
"Corporate Power in 2012: A Case Study"
Your term paper incorporates original research while engaging issues and debates raised by the course. The final product will be around 20 pages in length and integrate five thematic sections, i.e., Essays 2-6, each of which will have been drafted and previously revised over different due dates earlier in the semester. Each term paper will examine a specific corporation or economic organization that has some interest in the outcome of the 2012 U.S. elections—who becomes President, and/or who controls the Congress. What is the nature of the corporation/organization's interests in the elections? Are these interests based in its formal business/activities, the personal connections/investments of its leadership, pressures placed by the demands of the global financial system, some combination of these, something else? How will a favorable outcome allow the corporation/organization to exercise influence? What steps is it taking to ensure its preferred outcome in November 2012: campaign contributions, media campaigns, mobilizing citizens or other groups to advocate on its behalf, etc.? By researching, documenting and interpreting these details of your case-study corporation/organization, your paper will have material with which to answer broader questions from the class. Are corporations "strong" or "weak" (i.e., autonomous from or dependent upon its leadership and class constituency), and under what contexts? How do corporations frame the legimitimacy of their political activities, and what kind of opposition or sympathy do they draw from the public? How do corporate politics and corporate power in 2012 reveal the class agenda and social contradictions of the present neoliberal era?
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